NYAB Event - Rodney McMillian Exhibition

Rodney McMillian Exhibition

This event has ended.
At The Kitchen
Media: Painting, Installation

Los Angeles-based artist Rodney McMillian is a painter, sculptor, performer, and video maker whose work examines the socio-political dimensions of power associated with cultural, racial, and economic issues. Using Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic tale, The Road, as a point of departure, McMillian conjures up his own imagined, battered landscape by bringing together repurposed discarded furniture and historical ephemera with his own abstract, gestural paintings. The artist’s desolate panorama, however, is also suggestive of a sacred chapel-like space that calls attention to the roles that so many anonymous individuals have played in history. Through such allusions, McMillian explores indirectly the slippages between traditional ideas of faith and belief associated with a church and those underlying American Romantic landscape painting that mirrored the expansionist impulses of 19th century “manifest destiny.” In this way, McMillian also suggests how such historical concepts can be evident in reinvented forms today, whether in the proliferation of a religious right or in current foreign policies. The installation also features a sound piece composed by Stefan Tcherepnin and choreography by Taisha Paggett.
Curated by Rashida Bumbray